Ashore from Singapore

Broadcom International, a well-known company that makes semiconductors with applications for industrial motors and drives, is the latest big name to move back to the United States. The company announced its intention to redomicile last Thursday; although it remains a little unclear as to the ‘what’ and ‘where’ one week later.

It then made a bigger splash.

Broadcom put a bid on the table for $100 billion to purchase rival chip-maker Qualcomm November 7. It then upped the ante to a mammoth pot of $103 billion, a deal that has investors buzzing but no foregone conclusion as of Thursday. If it goes through, the deal would be the largest technology deal in history.

You can see why Broadcom’s reshoring plans have taken a public backseat.

From the original statements (and subsequent interviews) it appears to be Broadcom’s corporate structure that will relocate. Also, Broadcom didn’t initially pinpoint a location for it’s new U.S. headquarters. It currently has a secondary headquarters in San Jose, Calif., so one would presume these would take over as the central nervous system for the company. It later said it would relocate its ‘home address’ to Delaware, but keep headquarters in San Jose.

About 39% of Broadcom’s employees are in Asia. Broadcom has 7,500 U.S. employees across 24 states. It has manufacturing facilities in Colorado and Pennsylvania and engineering offices in California.

However, Broadcom (like Qualcomm) is what is known as a fabless semiconductor company, meaning it outsources all semiconductor manufacturing to Asian merchant foundries. Its relocation of address may have implications for U.S. job growth, but is not likely to wipe out its production based in China and Taiwan. Broadcom’s foundries include offhsore companies GlobalFoundries, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, Silterra, TSMC and United Microelectronics Corporation.